Winter's Tears
by vanhunks
Summary: P/T - Coda to Muse. Set just after the events in Muse. Not all persons show their emotions or grieve in the same way.


**Winter's Tears**

**A coda to "Muse"**

vanhunks

**Disclaimer: **Paramount owns the characters.

**Rating**: G

**Summary**: Set just after the events in Muse. Not all persons show their emotions or grieve in the same way.

**WINTER'S TEARS**

She had been missing for two weeks. A search for dilithium on a routine away mission that didn't bring her and Harry back. It was a state of affairs that affected everyone on Voyager. The ship was shrouded in gloom, veiled in deep melancholy, thrust into a quiet despair that even Tuvok did not bother to hide. In our own way, each of us experienced the loss of B'Elanna and Harry differently, though not to any lesser degree. 

In the beginning I was angry that not enough was done, that **I** didn't do enough. Like an impatient horse trying to rush out the gates I wanted to stomp across the sector and search for her. I was angry, yes. Until I realised that my behaviour courted a kind of patronising hand on my shoulder. Perhaps I was unfair in this summation, and the Captain was in reality very concerned for me as well. Anyway, it brought me up short, and from that moment I internalised whatever I felt. In the usual manner Tom Paris dealt with his agues, I was safe from prying eyes. It was my way of doing things, wasn't it? Still...

What I hated most were the stares, the sympathetic pats on the shoulder, the commiserations and clichéd 'time will heal the wounds, Tom', or 'be strong, Tom', or even such heartfelt utterances as 'I know just how you feel'. Some avoided me, too embarrassed to look at me. To tell the truth, that pained me more than actually talking to me, for their glances were furtive, a quick turn of the head away from me that indicated a certain shyness to share whatever it was they wanted to share, even if it were just a sympathetic smile. For not only did I lose my lover, I lost my best friend too. It might just take thirty days to expound all that B'Elanna and Harry meant to me. Now, I was doubly hit. 

I know. It is unfair not to draw into my own ruminations the loss the entire crew felt. They were affected too. But something about what was happening disturbed me. At first I wondered at it, trying to make sense while my own being was split in two. 

What were they doing? 

What they were doing, was beginning to accept that Harry and B'Elanna were not coming back; what they were doing was beginning to accept that Harry and B'Elanna were dead. What they were doing was entering a phase of grieving. I didn't want that. It was not an option. It was not an option at all. Though in all fairness, it was the waiting that turned B'Elanna and Harry's disappearance into terrifying possibilities of doom and death. 

They were not helping. Not really. Though my own responses were courteous, a wordless nod here, a quiet thanks there, it was far, very, very far from what I was feeling. They may have noticed the shadows under the eyes, but they did not see my quiet rage, my wordless despair. I know about the Captain's sleepless nights, Tuvok's meditation and lack of sleep that he, in typical Vulcan fashion, played down as 'something normal Vulcans can go without for two weeks'. I know about Neelix's attempts to cheer them up. Their 'grief' was there for others to see. 

I have never been one to display my innermost hurt, my deepest pain. It's not on show. I am not on show. There may be those who would, if they dared to say so to my face, express my 'lack of emotion' as 'dispassionate, unfeeling, uncaring'. They might compare me to Tuvok. They might even suggest that I could not have loved B'Elanna so much because I didn't adhere to the accepted dictates of expressing in words or an uncommon amount of tears just how I felt that my lover was gone from us, maybe forever. They could read into my smile an inability to honour the 'missing in action'. They could even declare that my behaviour in the conference room was Tom Paris with a bad case of histrionics. 

In that respect, I may very well be a very private person. That may be so, but my pain is real, very real. And so is my longing.

B'Elanna was gone. In the beginning we were all bolstered by our own optimism that we'd have them back in a matter of hours, no more than a few days. However badly they were injured, there was nothing the Doctor couldn't fix. There was still that buoyancy, that thought that they were alive somewhere which I suppose, must have been the outward showing of hope. Everyone felt it. I felt it. For haven't we come through six years in which the most terrible things have happened to us, and hope kept us alive? 

I could never, never accuse my commanding officers and the rest of the crew of not having worked hard enough in trying to find them. They did everything in their power to trace the missing Flyer that had B'Elanna and Harry on board. Yes, we knew with our usual aplomb - this was, after all, Voyager, with Janeway and Chakotay her commanding officers - that we'd get them back in no time at all. 

Yet, as each day grew inexorably into the fullness of the next, so my fear grew. I couldn't help it. It was a strange, strange coldness that gripped my heart and squeezed all the warmth from it. Every fibre, every valve and chamber that made up this organ called 'heart', became icicles of tears. Shiny as the sun would reflect their beauty, yet cold... ice cold... It turned me numb with pain.

That I might never see B'Elanna again was a thought I refused to consider, too inconceivable to harbour, to impossible to be true. But the self-same heart that could love, that could hate, that could feel all that we feel and burned with yearning, could trick us too, and betray us until we believed that what we feared had found substance at last. I began to fear that I would never see her again. 

So my heart, once warm and cozy in the blooming summer of companionship, slowly turned colder and colder, betrayed by the tears of winter's losses. 

I began to remember things about her. Things I'd not given any thought for a long time because she was always so...near, so...there. Some might say it was the old comfort of togetherness, a kind of complacency, a familiarity that rendered us impervious to the possibilities of parting, and the pain that would result from it. Suddenly now, I could see B'Elanna bending over her engines in Engineering, her slight frown of impatience when she was disturbed while deep in her work. Even I would be a recipient of that frown. I could see her laugh at a joke, or especially when Harry didn't get it. I remember the moments when we passed each other in the corridors and she'd touch my hand in passing, just long enough to say 'hello' because she was in a hurry. Yet, I remember that touch. I could still see the angry sheen of tears when she tried to disengage me from Alice. There were so many things, minute incidents that suddenly crowded my memories and I knew...I knew that I was giving in to a great despair that I wished to heaven would not be the loss of hope.

I saw her smile, heard the bright laughter, saw the turn of her head that made those curls swing. I heard her say: 

"Hey, Tom, don't forget we're in my quarters tonight..." or

"I love the way you say 'What's up, Doc?' just like that carrot-chewing bunny of yours."

Funny that these apparently stray wisps of conversation suddenly burst to the surface of my conscious thought, and not things like making love, lying together in the aftermath of stupendous sex. I haven't stopped to consider why, because I am convinced that it wasn't necessary. 

I just knew that all those little things, like the occasional touch of hands in the corridors, the glances in the conference room when we had meetings, the swing of her head, the lilt in her voice, her angry outbursts, her calm remonstrations, her objections if she didn't want to ski and I wanted to, her preferences when it came to food, choice of books, music, clothing...anything, would be what I'd remember about B'Elanna for the rest of my life, if...

If she never returned. 

By the second week, the cold winter had turned into a numbness that I tried at best to hide from others. Not to them would I show how my heart cried. How could my heart cry when it was frozen with fear that I may never see her again? That I may never experience her again?

I could not show them how I lay awake at night, wondering where she was, wondering whether she was injured or...dead. Dead. That was not an option I wanted to consider. Yet how insidiously could such a thought steal into one's heart! How could sleep be a panacea when all I did at night was remember? How restless, sleep! How forever, death!

B'Elanna came back. Both of them. Harry, my best friend, and B'Elanna, whom I love. 

B'Elanna whom I did not realise just how much I loved until she was gone. That she returned to Voyager and to me was a priceless gift; that she could live and hear me say the words 'I love you' is something that will for all time be engraved in my memory. Forever will I remember the look in her eyes when I told her of my feelings. For eternity will I remember the way her eyes became soft and warm, her voice low and hoarse when she hugged me and said: 

"I love you, Tom Paris."

She tried to be off-hand about how she missed me, yet her eyes and her voice told me all I needed to know, all I needed to hear, all I needed to understand the depth of her feelings for me. 

Why?

Because it was what she saw in my eyes, and what she heard in my voice. 

Nonchalant Tom Paris. Yeah, that's me. Yet B'Elanna could break down those walls and see right through me. 

If these two weeks taught me anything, it was that the uncertainty of B'Elanna's disappearance, the confusion and coldness that I experienced was far worse than had she died instantly, right here on Voyager like when it happened before on occasion. It gnawed and ate at my insides and like a hungry wolf the loneliness and fear and uncertainty and despair preyed on me. It was, I suppose, unlike Death which forced in a brutal way the reality of loss that sank its claws in us. 

I would not want to live through two weeks and experience not hell, but winter's tears.

B'Elanna told me about Kelis, and winter's tears. She told me about The Play. She was somehow different, and her animated accounts to me of her experience on that planet revealed facets of B'Elanna never before explored. I always think that all things, all possibilities in us are never explored fully, and for most of our lives there are things in us, and things about us that we will never realise. They lie dormant in us until something comes along - the poet and dramatist Kelis and his passion for expressing the lives of men and women through theatre - to bring out those heretofore unrealised and unfulfilled qualities. For B'Elanna, it was helping another realise his dreams; it was feeling a sense of accomplishment, an urgency and quivering, compelling need to share and be creative in ways so different from power couplings and warp cores. 

B'Elanna didn't change. Rather, she was touched in a way that had just added a new, exciting dimension to her. She was not just B'Elanna, the half-human, or B'Elanna, the half-Klingon. 

She was B'Elanna.

"Tom, they called dilithium 'winter's tears'," she told me.

Dilithium. Winter's tears. How poetic the name given to a power source. 

Beautiful. 

Rare.

"B'Elanna, I - "

I wanted to tell her of my fear, of the coldness and 'winter's tears' that settled around my heart. I wanted to tell her how much I missed her and how that fear gripped my heart. 

"It's alright, Tom." 

I felt her hand touch my cheek and when I looked in her eyes again, I knew I need never fear again. I told her everything. I told her first what mattered the most:

"I love you."

When I held her against me, I could feel how she shivered. Perhaps only then she allowed reaction to set in. But it was not before I saw the look in her eyes, a softness that echoed the sound of her voice that told me: she is mine forever, just as I am hers.

That awful numbness has thawed; that cold fear and uncertainty that clawed its way into my heart and threatened to tear its very fibres to shreds has left, and in its place came strength, an unshakeable faith and unquenchable hope. It was a warmth that seeped into my body again, and when it finally dissolved the icicles, I was able to feel. There was no fear, only an overwhelming relief and the incredible and urgent need to share what I felt. 

Then I spoke. It flowed from me, a torrent of words that were rushed, passionate, incoherent as I told her of my feelings, the confusion, the yearning. I told her of the dreams I had, I told her of the things that I remembered, those precious little things that formed such an indispensable part of her. Most of all, I told of my love. 

If I could never before display my deepest pain, my old, old shame and guilt which, thank God, B'Elanna was instrumental in helping me cope and accept and come to terms with, the last two days changed that forever. 

Only to her would I be vulnerable and show it. Maybe I don't even have to show it. She had simply sensed it, in a far more elemental way now than ever before. And B'Elanna?

"Tom, I want to tell you something."

"A story?"

"If you like."

"If it's about pigs and helmboys, I'm listening."

"No, about winter's tears."

"Winter's tears?" I asked. 

"Yes. Remember the two months you and Tuvok and the Doctor were stranded on that planet and we thought we'd never get you back?"

I nodded.

"The two months you were gone..."

"I thought I'd never see you again, B'Elanna."

"Tom...?"

"Yes?"

"I understand. Now. Everything..."

"I love you."

She smiled, a tired, happy smile. Just a tiny lift of the corner of her lips, but a smile. 

"Do you think they'll ever kiss?" 

"Who?" I play dumb. I know, but I just wanted to hear her voice. 

"You know, Starfleet and Maquis." 

"_We_ do." 

She laughed. It sounded like music. 

"The Captain and Chakotay. Kelis made them kiss, you know." 

"Maybe one day, B'Elanna. It's a hope." 

She gave a sigh of contentment. 

"Tom?"

"Hmmm?"

"Did you know that once..."

I was immediately intrigued by the way her voice lowered and the pause after saying that. I was caught in the suspense, despite the no-nonsense, almost Seven-like accounts of her story. Her eyes were animated, her hands gesticulated, and the way the side of one hand beat into the palm of the other left me utterly awe-struck. A gesture that was so familiar, yet so unique, giving emphasis to the way she spoke of the alien world whose lives were enriched by their culture, and the Eternals forever revered by them.

I know of Kelis, how Janeway and Chakotay removed their masks and kissed, how Seven kissed me! They were in little accounts of her stay there on that world, told with some forthrightness. Sometimes I could hear the heartache in her voice when she spoke of how she missed me, all her friends, Voyager. 

"It's a very appropriate name for dilithium crystals, isn't it?" she said. 

"Yes, it is," was all I could say, too much taken in by her nearness, too full of having her back with me, in my life. 

"Tom."

"Hmmm?"

"There were tears in your heart."

I didn't have to ask her how she knew.

It has been two days since her return. Last night we didn't make love. She just crawled into my arms and curled up there. I knew she wanted to feel me close to her, and the occasional shudder of her body was enough to tell me that she too, came to know despair. 

We've been through much the last two days, B'Elanna and I. Now we rest and savour the glory of being together again, we think of what we had almost lost. We are closer now than we have ever been. 

I am grateful that her life had been saved. I am grateful that I have her with me again. 

She lies in my arms, her body warm and soft against me. Her legs are entwined with mine. From time to time they move, shift position, relax even, but always entwined, always very, very close as if she couldn't bear being separated. I can hear her breathe. I can feel her lips against my neck, and the warmth of her breath against my skin, the ridge on her forehead grazing my chin. Sometimes I hear her whisper my name. There is a nameless longing in her voice. I press her close to me, and I tell her: "I am here..."

She gives a deep sigh. 

Then I know. 

B'Elanna is blessedly alive.

**

**end**


End file.
